Must-Have Books

Richard Meier, Architect: Volume 5

Continuing its best-selling monographic series on leading American architect Richard Meier, Rizzoli International’s latest installment covers the architect’s work since 2004. The new volume includes 11 residential and 21 public commissions, ranging from a compound of five private villas that spring from a steep hillside in Shenzhen, China, to the sweeping arc and glass rotunda of the San Jose City Hall in California’s Silicon Valley. Essays by Columbia’s Ware Professor of Architecture, Kenneth Frampton, and architecture critic Paul Greenberg examine these projects and how the designs fit into the larger context of Meier’s nearly five-decade-long career. A postscript by artist and longtime friend Frank Stella provides a glimpse into the summer of 1958, when the two were introduced through a painting class with New York abstractionist Stephen Greene. In the months that followed, Meier developed friendships with other fine-art students, including sculptor Carl Andre and photographer Hollis Frampton, creating a pivotal “energetic, confident scrambling of disciplines” that greatly influenced his vision. “To appreciate Richard’s greatness as an architect,” Stella writes, “you have to credit his gifts as a painter and a sculptor.”

Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., $80

Jacques Grange Interiors

Architectural Digest first published Paris-based interior designer Jacques Grange in November 1978. Of the Pigalle pied-à-terre featured, Jean-Louis Gaillemin wrote that Grange had “employed a subtle use of time and style.” That subtlety, that mixing of high and low, that “strange confrontation of styles,” as he once described his approach to AD, has run consistently through his designs of the past 30 years. With a knack for self-effacement, he lets the personalities of his clients take the lead. (And what personalities they have been: Yves Saint Laurent and Paul Bergé, the Rothschilds, Paloma Picasso, Valentino and Princess Caroline of Monaco, to name a few.) Grange’s great skill lies in identifying stand-alone pieces, which he then places in a room of similarly potent pieces—but in a way that they don’t compete. Instead, they form a surprising and amiable companionship: a Rococo portrait flanked by Egyptian Revival torchères, or an Alexander Calder mobile atop a Régence console table, or even a sago palm finding a happy home in a Wedgwood vase. So discreet is Grange’s hallmark on an interior that it goes almost unnoticed. Until now, that is, with the publication of his first monograph, written by partner and antiques dealer Pierre Passebon. Its large-format photographs allow readers to linger over Grange’s mysterious combinations and revel in the small details. As Passebon explains, “Jacques doesn’t just make homes beautiful; he gives them an appeal, a certain distinction, a special soul. What makes him so special and touching, for me, is his mixture of pride and insecurity. He listens attentively and sincerely, but whatever happens he remains the maestro.”

Flammarion, $65

In House

Following his recent publications Rooms, Notting Hill and A Gardener’s Life, London-based photographer and longtime Architectural Digest contributor Derry Moore now shares a very special collection of images taken between 1978 and 2008. Rather than being compiled by the editor or the publisher, all of the photographs were chosen by Moore, thereby illuminating the artist’s response to his subjects as much as they do the rooms themselves. “In the selection of houses,” Moore writes, “my choice, unsurprisingly, has been influenced by the occasions where I felt happiest with the actual photographs.” He goes on to say that “most of the houses in this book express the desire for some perfected and unspecified, even unconscious ideal.” Ideals—and aesthetics—of generations past are sensitively, even hauntingly, captured through Moore’s lens. The book looks at now-public spaces (the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, India, and Malplaquet House in London, for example) as well as private homes in the United States, Great Britain, Turkey, Greece, Spain, France and the Czech Republic, several of which have been featured in Architectural Digest and all of which posess what Moore refers to as “a slightly faded grandeur.” The interiors, he explains, fall loosely into three categories: historic houses that were designed “in one fell swoop, so to speak…where the original design was so rigorous that any later additions would have seemed superfluous”; historic houses that “have had the advantage of inheriting superb collections of furniture and paintings… [and] bearing the additions and modifications of successive owners, have acquired a rich patina”; and those which, for whatever reason, were simply abandoned, leaving “spiders and mice—and moths, alas!—the only tenants.” It’s a visual treat, with an essay on each house by Mitchell Owens.

Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., $60

Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings and Projects, 2004-2009

Begun in 1981, this latest installment of the Buildings and Projects series marks the 40th anniversary of Robert A. M. Stern Architects. Edited by Peter Morris Dixon, an associate at the firm, the book begins with a conversation between Stern and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New Yorker. It’s a dialogue about how we look at history, and when Stern speaks of Sir Edwin Lutyens and George Howe as being “modern in spirit but not futurist,” he could easily be speaking of his own work. But it is as much a dialogue about the importance of creating architecture that encourages conversation, whether it be a neighborly chat on the front porch or an unspoken dialogue between a building and a person—a city dweller suddenly struck by the beauty and logic of the new public library or the way a museum walkway slowly lowers light levels, allowing visitors’ eyes to adjust as they approach a darkened gallery of delicate textiles. With nearly 600 glorious, full-color pages, the volume covers some 125 projects. From the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas to Ritz-Carlton hotels in Kazakhstan, from a cottage in Sonoma, California, to courthouses that will actually make you want jury duty, it’s a staggering compilation of work.

The Monacelli Press, $75

Harry Benson: Photographs

Don’t be fooled by the straightforward title. This is no mere book of photographs; this is a history book, an illustrated timeline of world events that have shaped more than half a century. In his introduction, AD contributor John Loring writes that Harry Benson often observes of his subjects, “There for a moment and gone forever.” Gone, yes, but not lost entirely. Throughout the pages are portraits of famous actors, musicians, artists, writers, royalty, athletes and politicians. Throughout these same pages are portraits of anonymous soldiers, veterans, draft dodgers, Afghan guerillas, Klan members, New York firefighters, civil rights marchers, schoolchildren and Somali refugees. Benson, all the way through, tells the stories behind those captured moments. Some remembrances are comical. Of his tour of Augusta, Georgia, with James Brown he writes, “He would stop the car when he saw someone sitting in their yard, run up, do the split, yell out, ‘I feel good,’ and jump back in the car and drive off.” Other remembrances are poignant, “When I asked [Alexander Solzhenitsyn] what he liked about his adopted country, he said the air smelled free in America.” Benson, a longtime contributor to AD, is a photographer who started out with a Brownie and now works with digital. Born in Scotland, he became an American citizen in 1999 and a Commander of the British Empire just last year. He watched the Berlin wall go up, and he watched the Berlin wall come down. He’s ridden in the President’s limo and the general’s helicopter. He’s coaxed sitters with a song and disguised himself in order to get the shot. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was tear-gassed in Canton, Mississippi. He’s got a soft spot for Pat Nixon. The pictures are all here. In the end, the moments don’t last forever—fortunately, in some cases—but through Benson’s archive of images we have a profound visual record of our past.